Posted on September 6, 2018 by MichaelHeydt

Are you an IT professional or developer who wants to create effective applications that run on Azure? Then this course is for you. Creating applications that run well on Azure requires intimate knowledge of how to code them so that they’re cloud-native and effectively use Azure, PaaS, and IaaS. The Microsoft 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions exam will test your knowledge and experience in performing these requirements. This course also covers the October 2017 and March 2018 exam objectives.
Azure provides powerful facilities for running applications using both infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). This might mean using farms of virtual machines to elastically run non-cloud-native applications. Or it could mean creating cloud-native apps that utilize the full power of Azure PaaS by using services such as App Services, Service Fabric, Logic Apps, or Functions. This 70-532 course will teach you these skills so that you can pass the exam.
The course follows the same general structure as the top-level requirements of the exam:

Create and Manage Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Design and Implement a Storage and Data Strategy

Manage Identity, Application, and Network Services

Design and Implement Azure Compute, Web, and Mobile Services

The 70-532 course breaks down into these same four requirements. Each has multiple sections focusing on the specific skills requested on the exam. Then each section consists of multiple lessons, which demonstrate various objectives of the skill. This course is designed as a certification prep, focusing on what you need to know in order to pass the exam. To be honest, that’s a lot; this is one of the more complex Azure certification exams. These four top-level exam requirements could each probably be a course of their own.
The course consists of 28 sections, everyone focusing on an individual Azure skill that’s tested on the exam. Each section contains multiple lessons, with each lesson demonstrating the use of a particular concept or skill rather than being just an exposition of facts with slides. The lessons and study guide, combined with exams and quizzes (designed to guide you to the specific knowledge required for the exam), take a holistic approach to helping you pass the exam. Lessons show the how and explain much of the why. The study guide contains many references pointing to the documentation, which supports the various concepts tested in the exam. The quizzes and exam function as an assessment of what you learned in the course and also expose additional items which will appear on the exam.
Being a 70-532 exam prep course, most of the lessons dive into practical how-to’s, detailing the plethora of concepts in the exam. Many focus on specific practical tasks to use in the real world. Here is just a taste of the things I’ll cover and demonstrate:

Spinning up an Azure Kubernetes Cluster, then deploying and running an application

Creating, configuring, and imaging both Windows and Linux virtual machines

Elastic scaling of virtual machines using virtual machine scale sets

Using configuration tools, such as Powershell DSC, to configure virtual machines

Deploying web applications directly from Visual Studio to a virtual machine using WebDeploy